Fire in Babylon makes you proud to be a human being

Friday 20 May 2011 08:53 BST

This gripping story of the rise and rise of West Indian cricket is not always an easy watch.

Early scenes, showing the Windies' fast bowlers making mincemeat of the opposition, feel not just unsporting but horribly macho. Yet Stevan Riley's documentary manages to make beautiful sense of the brutality.

It all started when Australia thrashed Clive Lloyd's "Calypso Cricketers" 5-1 in the 1975 Test series Down Under. Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson hurled balls at the men's tenderest spots.

Australian crowds, meanwhile, hurled racist abuse.

Lloyd and the gang decided enough was enough. And out of the ashes, as it were, insanely fast bowlers such as Michael Holding and Colin Croft were born.

Cut to August 1976 and an England captain (the South African-born Tony Greig) telling the press that he intended to make the West Indians "grovel". It is deeply satisfying to watch Greig's team being trounced. By the time you see Lloyd's team playing Australia in the 1984-85 series, and playing rather well, I guarantee you will be leaping around in your seat, doing your own version of a victory dance.

Riley is British. So are the film's producers (one of them is Ben Goldsmith, brother of Zac). The great thing about the film, ironically, is that it feels like such an all-Caribbean affair. The talking heads are exclusively black, the soundtrack obviously assembled by a lover of reggae. This is an intimate portrait, not an anthropological treatise. And every word uttered is vibrantly political. It speaks volumes that the only time Viv Richards becomes moist-eyed is when talking about his refusal to join the South African rebel tours. (Richards notes that his absence was "appreciated" by the incarcerated Nelson Mandela.)

Not so much triumphalist as upbeat, saucy rather than slick, Fire in Babylon is the kind of film that makes you proud to be a human being.